Ireland was a young, impressionable nation when this constitution was devised – we are now older and wiser – have experienced the evanescent hedonism of the Celtic-Tiger, white knuckled austerity, welcomed same sex marriage and elected an openly gay taoíseach to see it all through. A small country, intellectually liberated and no longer servile to colony, God or State. I want law to reflect this.

Spirituality should not monopolized by the world’s major religions. Spirituality should not be conflated with politics, and spirituality shouldn’t be coerced into the ethical argument, either. Spirituality is love, be it chemical, hormonal or whatever. Biological/political realities such as fertility, infertility, motherhood, death, profundity/miraculousness of life should never be tied up by the politik. These things are persuasive vestiges of the Catholic Church to further an oppressive governance in tandem with the State- things they couldn’t scientifically comprehend so created a mystical cultural orthodoxy to control, through which a country became so enfeebled many of our greats had to travel abroad to feel intellectually emancipated. But, then aha!, you see it was the Irish MALE writer who gallantly went abroad to escape the censorious religiosity at home – yes, ennoble him! don’t mention the unspeakable Women!

You must consider this too, that, when the political hierarchy of’ 37 were fundamentally devout on enshrining spiritual life as public life – there was never going to be a sexual revolution, a liberation of consciousness that occurred in France, the US or England. This is what created the curiousness of the Irish psyche – that pallid mixture of post-colonialism, the collective melancholy caused by famine related death and famine related emigration and you’re going to have a very vulnerable nation – easily hypnotized by Yer Man Upstairs. What’s more governable – a country that believe the will of government is the will of the Supernatural? Easy peasy. Masterstroke. Give that man a pint so he doesn’t question it.

Unfortunately that spiritual doctrine was Roman Catholic – a crazed, superstitious,clandestine, prehistoric cult full of fantasy and allegory – NOT something that should ever have pervaded individual Irish public life, least of all through a legally binding constitution. But then – we’d no identity – quick! give us Dogma and a thousand Hail Mary’s (prayer as hypnosis, the virgin as Martyr, immaculate conception, sex as sin, Sunday mass as social magnification, yadda-yadda).

Religious teachings can be morally anchoring, give succour and ballast to billions of people all over the world; but – when the folklore of ancient times leaves Irish women living 2018 in crippling bondage to the State, a state of theocratic politics, then it’s time to update the reality.

Feel free to absorb yourself with as much Rosecrucian esotericism as you like, Francis! just don’t immolate the rest of us poor beggars!

A monotheistic dogma may be welcomed by some (masochists), and, will probably persist privately among thousands of those of whom the ascetic & subservient life gets their juices flowing, but – to impose this theocracy on an entire nation is alarmingly unfair and anachronistic. To have a mystical will of a supposedly divine entity govern and invade first of all a political arena is egregious, but, for it to then infest lives of women in the most appalling ways imaginable, of women who just wanted to be free to choose, to not have their personal narratives changed by the signatures of a few. This is a change to their lives with the X’s of the many. If there’s one thing we can be thankful for, it’s living in a democracy with the power to alter this harrowing reality once and for all.

This is not a referendum about gleefully carving up foetuses (some of the images I’ve seen on the Pro-Life side have given me week-long nausea and are grossly misleading and inaccurate) – this is about creating laws that are commensurate with a sophisticated, well educated, progressive European country. Obstetricians, gynecologists and WOMEN should be given more air time than anyone else over the coming weeks. That’s not to extirpate the voices of men, although this commands acute, technicolour debate.

Catholicism is a thought policing, society policing, womb policing Orwellian fantasy – something far more insidious and degenerate than Zuckerberg, Trumpism or the E.U. It may persist in some pockets of pre-industrialized corners of the world and so it may. Again, I do not renounce a spiritual dimension but it should be private and never invade political frameworks, inform laws, or eviscerate lives. I do not want the women of my nation of birth be subservient to a constitution informed by apocryphal scripture that tells them motherhood is all they’re ever destined to achieve – even if it means taking them with it.